Iowa Territory

A hundred and thirty years ago, the Bailey family of
Kansas broke through the Missouri River defenses at Fort Leavenworth and quickly
trapped and massacred the army sent to stop them at Gallatin, Missouri.
Rampaging at will among the helpless farmers of Iowa, they slaughtered every
male they encountered, corralled the women into slave pens, and loaded their
wagons with the loot of a hundred devastated towns. Riding far ahead of the
main Bailey force, an allied clan, the Dabneys, siezed the ferries across the
Mississippi and spread the devastation deeper into the Midwest. By the time
their vanguard was turned back at Lima, Ohio, they had cut a deep gash of
destruction across half the Midwest.

For the next fifty years, Dabney raids out of Illinois were an annual event.
Wisconsin learned almost immediately that it was better just to pay them off
rather than face another invasion. Ohio built a great
line of ditches, towers and walls along the Wabash and cringed in anticipation
of the next attack. Michigan took some nasty hits; so
did Tennessee. Then something amazing happened.

George, the new leader of the Baileys, allowed merchants from Memphis to
rebuild St. Louis. Having been raised among the luxuries of civilization,
George had a taste for the finer things, but he realized that two generations of
genocide had driven civilization out of reach. The Dabneys of Illinois were in
his way, so in exchange for converting to Non-Denom and giving Shelby County
trading rights in his kingdom, he got to borrow an armada of river boats from
Memphis to attack and anihilate the Dabneys. It took several years, but
finally, the Baileys established mastery over the whole region from the Missouri
to the Wabash.

That was eighty years ago. Since then, the civilization of the Midwest has
seaped back into Iowa, and there is almost no relic of the territory's original,
barbarian past.

Except the name. The original kingdom that had been wiped out by the
Baileys had covered almost exactly the same area as the current Territory of
Iowa, but because it had originated east of the Mississippi and spread west by
conquest, it had been called the State of Illinois. Now Illinois is no longer a
state, only a a place.